Roblox Developers Set to Earn Over $100 Million in 2019

At RDC, its fifth annual developers conference, Roblox, an online platform bringing more than 100 million people together through play, unveiled the community was on pace to earn $100 million in 2019. The company introduced a suite of tools to empower its global community of creators to build and more easily collaborate on immersive and massive 3D experiences.

Company Introduces New Developer Tools for Immersive, Massive 3D Experiences

“The Roblox creator community thinks of things we could never imagine, and their continued growth is our future,” said David Baszucki, founder and CEO, Roblox. “With top Roblox experiences achieving more than 100,000 concurrent users and 1 billion plays, there’s no denying the power of user-generated content. We are committed to supporting our creator community with the tools and resources they need to realize even greater success.”

Over the course of the three-day event in California and at a viewing party in London, 500+ top Roblox creators from around the world gathered to hear keynote presentations, attend breakout sessions and participate in the annual Game Jam. The global community of more than 2 million creators spans from young creators getting their start in game design and coding, to teams of ten or twenty people forming studios.

“I’ve been a member of the Roblox community for over a decade, first as a player, then as a developer and now as CEO of RedManta, a game studio dedicated purely to Roblox development. Building and creating are a passion of mine, and from the early days I saw a future growing alongside the platform,“ said Alexander Hicks, RedManta CEO and RDC attendee. ”With new tools and technology to more easily create massive and beautiful games, we are pushing even our own expectations for what we can create on Roblox, like our upcoming experience, World // Zero.”

“What I love about Roblox is that it breaks down the barriers for game designers, giving them a chance to be creative, try new things, and share it with a massive player community,” said Robin Hunicke, Funomena Co-founder, who delivered a keynote address at RDC on game design. She added, “The enthusiasm and camaraderie from these young creators was fantastic, and they share my belief in the power of games to bring people together. I can’t wait to see what they create next!”

Immersive, Massive 3D ExperiencesRoblox introduced game creation tools to help small teams of developers easily build massive, more realistic experiences that support hundreds of players. This technology builds on the existing networking support and hosting services the company provides for free, which automatically scales in real-time to meet player demand. As part of the toolset, creators can leverage Roblox’s new enhanced lighting system and updated terrain and other visual upgrades to make deep, rich experiences that rival top mobile games. In addition, the company is enabling the community to easily build competitive matchmaking, which will ensure players of similar skill-levels can compete against one another.

Collaboration ToolsRoblox will make Roblox Studio fully cloud-based by the end of 2019, allowing team members to collaborate simultaneously. All development files will be completely online and provide native support for collaborators across various computing platforms. Creators will be able to manage permissions, versioning, and rollbacks, allowing for more efficiency across all aspects of the development timeline.

New Ways to MonetizeRoblox also extended the power of user-generated content to its development platform, allowing creators to build and monetize development assets and tools in a new Developer Marketplace. In addition to offering a new channel to monetize their work, the Developer Marketplace will also help strengthen the overall experiences on the platform by crowd-sourcing solutions to help make development even easier. Creators will be able to sell game design tools including plug-ins, vehicles, 3D models, terrain enhancements, and more.

Localization SupportTo further support the platform’s growth internationally, Roblox announced improvements to its localization platform making it easier for creators to offer experiences in Roblox’s supported languages, including Brazilian Portuguese, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and Spanish.

Advanced Analytics Powered by Microsoft Azure PlayFabRoblox outlined details of its earlier announced collaboration with Microsoft Azure PlayFab, making PlayFab’s LiveOps analytics service available for free to the company’s top 10,000 creators.

By delivering real-time analytics to their creators, including trends in player behavior, purchase history, and game telemetry, Roblox expects to empower those game creators to make their games even more successful and enjoyable for players. Some creators may choose to go even further with other LiveOps practices, such as updating their game more frequently, running live events, segmenting their players or targeting communications. This new service is driven by PlayFab’s data pipeline and can support hundreds of thousands of games events per second coming from Roblox.

Crystin Cox, Director of Live Operations at Xbox Game Studios Publishing, who also presented the benefits of the new service for game creators at this year’s RDC, commented, “LiveOps is driving growth, both in terms of player engagement and monetization, for the most popular games and platforms available today. LiveOps represents a new approach to game design combined with a better process driven by experimentation and we’re excited to offer Roblox developers a new way to think about their players.”

About RobloxRoblox’s mission is to bring the world together through play. Every month, more than 100 million people around the world have fun with friends as they explore millions of immersive digital experiences. All of these experiences are built by the Roblox community, made up of over two million creators. We believe in building a safe, civil, and diverse community—one that inspires and fosters creativity and positive relationships between people around the world. For more information, please visit corp.roblox.com.